Hello everyone! I am quite new to Craftster but after seeing all the impressive craftiness that takes place on this site, I am sure someone can help me!

I am returning to an old 11 x 14 cross stitching project that I haven't touched in about 6 months and realized... the reason I haven't touched it in so long is because I messed up pretty badly.

Somehow I ended up being off about 5 rows and I am not sure if I should try to work with what I have or undo all the stitches that should be 5 rows below (about 10 rows of stitches). I am worried if I try to fudge it, my pattern will not fit properly on the fabric/or it will look goofy. I am also worried that if I try to undo the thread it might damage the fabric since the stitches have been in place for so long. Also, I stupidly left it in a hoop meaning I will have horrible crease marks once I take it off.

Does anyone have any advice they can offer to me, or should I hide this project again for another 6 months?

Can you just fudge a little bit on that part or maybe add something to it to fill in the mistake? Why don't you start on another part of the piece and then work your way to the area you messed up on and do some sort of fill then? As a last resort you can take it out but that would be a big pain.

Cross stitch fabric is pretty forgiving. Take it out of the hoop give it a good ironing.As for the lines being off, I guess that would depend on the design in that area. If you decide to take the stitching out it would be easiest on the fabric to use very sharp very pointy small scissors to cut through the front "x's" on the front of the fabric. Then run a good sticky lint roller on the back of the fabric to pick up as much as possible. You can manually pick off/out the rest. Iron again and you will be good to go.

I always frog it when I make a mistake because I'm kind of retentive about that (nothing else in my life mind you, just cross stitching). Often I'll just snip out the wrong stitches and pull out a few more of the surrounding ones so that I have some tails on the back which I then just stitch over when I fill in the gap. This may mean that I have up to ten loose ends that I need to deal with, but it works suprisingly well and quick and you don't have to frog the entire colour.

Personally I think I'd undo it and try again, because I'm really anal about stuff like that. It might damage the fabric slightly, but usually it looks okay again after you restitch over it.

If it's too much to redo (and 10 lines sounds like quite a lot), I think it depends on what it actually was that was stitched in the wrong place. If it was just a bit of the background or something, you can probably fudge it and just fill in the gap with some more background. If it was an actual object though, I'd undo it and try again, otherwise it'll end up looking a funny shape.

As for the creases, just iron it I'd put it on a piece of thick fabric or something first though so you don't end up completely flattening all of your stitches.

Since the screwed up part is actually the main part of the picture (the darn borders are perfect though...), I'm going to painfully redo it since trying to work with it is going to cause more problems.